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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Make Eggshell dolls

During a recent trip to our library, I found a couple of old craft books showing how to create dolls from eggshells. I'd never seen this type of craft before, so I was super excited to try it out.

If you're like me, you have a thing for Matryoshka dolls... and fairy tales. (Random tangent time: As a kid I used to read tons and tons of fairy tales. Magical powers? Fairies? Elves? Yup. Yup. Yup. I loved it all. This love for fairy tales ended up morphing into a love of science fiction and fantasy novels later on... but I digress.)

Here are my results:

Make Eggshell Dolls

I had fun making them... but I had way more fun decorating them. In my opinion, painting cute things is the best part about crafting.

If you'd like to make your own eggshell dolls, read on!

Materials:

- Eggshell(s) (<-- crap!)

- Safety Pin

- Chopstick

- Bowl

- Masking tape

- Cardboard strip(s)

- 5 pennies (per doll)

- Mod Podge

- Tissue Paper

- Scissors

- Craft paints

- Paint brushes

- Foam brush

Directions:

1. Let's empty out your eggs. To do so, use your safety pin and prick a hole at the wide end of the egg and another hole at the narrow end of the egg. Use a chopstick to enlarge the hole at the narrow end so that it's about the size of a penny. (Push firmly, but gently. Don't be scared! I'm pretty clumsy and ruined a few eggs in the process.)

2. Hold your egg over a bowl. Place your mouth over the small hole and blow. Watch the egg insides ooze out. (Pretty gross and cool!)

3. Thoroughly wash and dry your eggshells. (I just let them sit out for a day.) (Optional: Make scrambled eggs with all your egg innards ... or a quiche... or a frittata... yum.)

4. Place a piece of masking tape over your small hole.

5. Cut out a thin paper strip and roll it into a circle. Tape the ends together. This will now act as your egg stand.

6. Stand your egg on the stand with the masking tape on top (large hole on bottom). Cut your tissue paper into squares. Dip these tissue squares into Mod Podge and use them to cover the top of the eggshell.

7. Once those tissues dry, turn the eggshell over. Now the large hole should be on top. Make sure your hole is big enough so that you can drop pennies into your egg. Pour a bit of Mod Podge into your egg. Then, drop 5 pennies into the egg. (These pennies will weight down your egg so that it will stand upright even after being knocked over.)

Note: Pour just enough glue to make sure that your pennies stick to each other and to the bottom of your eggshell. If you pour too much, it will take forever to dry.

8. Now cover this upper part of your egg with more gluey tissue paper squares. Now your whole egg should be covered in tissue squares.

9. Take your egg off your stand and rock it back and forth to make sure that the pennies are in the right position to properly weight down your egg. Once you're satisfied with how your egg is standing, let it sit untouched for a couple of days. (Waiting is tough, but you can do it!)

10. Once everything seems dry*, paint away! I used blue tissue paper, so I had to first paint my eggs white first to make sure that my craft paint went on evenly.

(*Note: Honestly, I had a tough time figuring out whether the glue inside of my egg was dry. Baby Chuck and I smashed two of them after waiting 3 days and one was almost dry and the other one had way too much glue in it, so it was still wet. If you have any thoughts/ideas.... I'd love to hear them.)

Oh my.. these are simply gorgeous! I read a tonne of fairy tales as a child too :) I'll be featuring your post as part of my homemade crafts roundup from the Weekly Kids' Co-op. Thanks for sharing. xoxo P

:) Have fun! I've also seen some cute ideas using plastic eggs. Just put silly putty on the bottom of one end to weight it down. Then you can use Sharpies to decorate the eggs. It's a similar effect, but much simpler (in case your granddaughter is younger or just likes quick crafts.) Thanks for visiting!